Xl-320 Based Hexapod

[TXBDan]

If you're in HS and this is your first robot/hw/sw project this is very impressive!

How did you make your simulation environment?

Have a github we can check out?

Great job!

[Shotch]

I started it while in HS, but that's not so much the case anymore. It was the first 'big' project I started working on, there's now been quite a few that have happened on the side since this one started.

The visualizer has changed quite a bit. It use to just be OpenGL Panel in a wxWidgets window. That became a pain to maintain and deal with, so I've slowly started to separate a lot of different parts of this project to make it far easier to work on, while the main code that runs on the robot can easily interact with the now separated pieces.

The new visualizer is running a Processing3 sketch inside of an Electron App, and communicating over sockets. It has both a driven and a driver mode where it acts as only a visualizer for actual movements of the hexapod by polling the servos for their positions and velocities periodically, and using that information to run things forward for half a second or so before polling again.
The driver mode is designed to be used as a means of remote control over a larger distance, instead of wirelessly connecting a controller to the hexapod, it processing, and then streaming the data out to be seen. It looks at the versions file in the hexapod and if there is a mismatch it uses scp to transfers over the hexapod's config file, makes sure they have the right framework version and then starts to run a copy of the heaxpod locally, as the hexapod itself swaps it's controller over from whatever you were connecting with to the socketController, the remote version sets it's outputs to be a socketStreamer instead of the dynamixel controller object, which just direct sends out the data sent to it over sockets.

I have stuff floating around privately for it, but nothing out publicly yet, There's a lot of very poorly formatted and thought out jupyter notebooks and I haven't yet consolidated a lot of the individual components into one larger well structured project. Example, I want to keep the Fabrik library its own independent thing, as well as all the visualizer code. However, since I'm close to being done with the build of this new one, there will probably be a push to get the codebase into something vaguely presentable soon.

[kadersin]

Hello!

I was wondering how you were controlling your XL-320 from the Raspberry Pi? Have you used another board to do so? If so, which one is it?

Thanks!

[Shotch]

Hello!

I was wondering how you were controlling your XL-320 from the Raspberry Pi? Have you used another board to do so? If so, which one is it?

Thanks!

The XL-320 based one is controlled from the Pi through a USB2AX. The latest one I've been working on is controlled from a NanoPi NEO Plus2 and a separate microcontroller doing passthrough for the serial commands, so basically the same thing but was more convenient for me to source and use.